Zend Debuts PHPcloud

PHP was the core language of the 1.0 era of the web, bringing scripting to the emerging Internet. PHP vendor Zend now wants PHP to be the language for the cloud and today announced a new service to do just that.

The PHPcloud.com service is built on top of Amazon and provides developers with an application platform. The developer cloud component provides developers with a PHP sandbox for apps that provides code tracing to help improve applications.

"We believe that that cloud enables us to deliver a significant step up in developer productivity," Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend told InternetNews.com.

The developer cloud integrates with the Zend Studio 9 IDE, which is now in beta, as well as the Eclipse PDT (PHP developer tools) project. Gutmans noted that there is going to be an open source SDK that will enable other IDE projects and vendors to connect to the php developer cloud as well.

The code tracing feature in the developer cloud can be accessed via a browser toolbar. The toolbar shows developers if something has gone wrong on their php server instance from an application coding perspective.

"Our goal is to provide an innovative and through experience for the development paradigm," Gutmans said.

From a collaboration perspective, the php cloud provides the ability to take snapshots of their application sandbox. The snapshot captures source code, database configuration and schema. The snapshot can then be shared with others that can then import the snapshot to their own environments.

The new Zend Application Fabric, which is also being announced today, will enable developers to easily move their application to whatever cloud deployment they choose.

"The underlying fabric is consistent between the developer cloud and whatever production cloud you're running on," Gutmans said. "So if you're building and testing your application in a development environment, you know that it will run exactly the same way in production."